Toby Stuart

You know, we're old, so I'm older than you.

This was the Career Center day.

So I walked into the Career Center and there was this list of companies coming to interview.

And it's still kind of the same, but back then, if you graduate from a pretty good college in economics, your choice is, do you want to go into banking or consulting or these generalist kinds of roles?

And so I got an offer at a consulting firm, but just as I was about to sign on the dotted line...

Harvard Business School showed up.

So at Harvard Business School, they teach every day a case study, and they were interviewing people to write case studies.

What happens is you get hired by a faculty.

So I was hired by a fellow called David Collis, who's still there.

He was developing HBS's first course on corporate strategies.

And every day at HBS, you teach with a case study.

So we needed 20 new cases on corporate strategy.

So he would identify this list of companies, contact the executives, get permission to do it, have some sense of what it was going to be about ahead of time, but not full sense, and then we would show up and write the case.

I had this one job offer, which was to go work for a consulting firm, which kind of means make spreadsheets and work really hard.

This other one, which was way less hours, and the job was fly around the world and meet corporate executives and take notes and then learn to ask your own questions.

I'm like, A or B?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

B.

I went there.

I didn't even know what a business school was, but I loved my two years there.